Editor’s note: Contributor Mandy Naglich is an Advanced Cicerone® and author of How to Taste: A Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life. She often writes about beer and wine, but also turns her attention to cheese.
Eating cheese is always a treat, but to fully appreciate and celebrate the diversity cheese has to offer, we turn our attention to tasting, not just eating. I talked to four cheese experts about how to design an easy but effective cheese tasting that will bump up your appreciation for the finest category of dairy products.
Identify Your Goals
Olivia Haver, photo courtesy of The Farm at Doe Run
Planning for an epic cheese tasting starts long before you’re sitting with samples in front of you, in fact it starts before you even get to the store. Prior to writing a shopping list, define the intention behind the tasting. Are you hoping to learn about a single type of cheese? Or do you want to taste everything the world of cheese has to offer?
“For an educational tasting you might get the same type of cheese aged three different lengths or made in three different countries so you can compare the differences,” says Olivia Haver, Head Affineur at The Farm at Doe Run. For example, try three Goudas one made in America, the Netherlands, and Norway.
Or as Jill Allen, Director of Product Excellence, Tillamook County Creamery Association suggests you can try the same cheese at three different ages. Like the Tillamook’s Maker’s Reserve Cheddar Cheese collection which offers the same base cheese aged for three all the way up to ten years. Instead of comparing very similar cheeses, you can also compare opposites Allen says, “For example, you can learn about a soft bloomy rind cheese versus a hard natural rind cheese and see how they cut differently, smell differently, look differently, and feel differently.”
If you’re more excited about exploring the wide varieties of cheese available, base your shopping list off finding a soft cheese, a hard cheese, and a blue cheese. If you’d like four cheeses, I recommend adding a flavored cheese with ingredients like spices, herbs, or flowers. A cheese like The Big John’s Cajun from Beehive Cheese which is seasoned with a blend of garlic, celery seed and cayenne brings another dimension to a tasting that goes beyond dairy flavors.
Once you’ve decided on the game plan, you can head to the store.
Shop for Cheese
At the shop, try to get your cheeses freshly sliced from the cheesemonger behind the counter. The wheels in the cheese case are stored at the perfect temperature with the ideal level of air exposure, so they will be a little tastier than the pre-wrapped wedges found in the dairy aisle. However, if there is no monger at your shop don’t worry the pre-wrapped cheeses are still excellent. Learn more about cut to order versus pre-cut.
Once you’ve selected your cheeses it’s time to shop for any accouterments. Look for a neutral cracker that won’t compete with your cheeses but will add a little crunch and some accompaniments to add flavors to the mix. Learn which crackers cheese experts favor. Picking up ingredients that align with the five basic tastes is a good way to add variety to the flavors on the board. For example, a sweet fruit jam, some pickled cornichons for sour, a salty salami, sun dried tomatoes for umami, and for bitterness a hoppy IPA or bitter amaro.
Prepare the Cheese
You should serve cheese for tasting at room temperature. “I will set my cheeses out about an hour before a tasting, and sometimes even with that long, they’ll still be cool to the touch” notes Brian Gilbert, founder of Gilbert’s Cheese Experience, past head cheesemaker at Beecher’s and Certified Cheese Professional ACS CCP, CCSE.
The problem with cold cheese? When cheese is cold, it holds on tightly to its aroma and flavor compounds, which makes them harder to perceive and appreciate. As cheese approaches room temperature, the texture will soften, and flavors will be more accessible.
The optimal way to slice cheese for tasting is in triangles that all have a little bit of rind. “I always ask people to try a little bit of the rind,” says Haver, “then if you don’t like it, you don’t need to eat it.” Even if you don’t eat the rind itself, the flavor of the cheese changes as you move from the rind to the innermost core of the cheese. “At the center flavors will be the most mild,” Haver adds. This cutting technique is also important for cheeses that carry flavor on the rinds like Beehive’s Barely Buzzed which has a rind rubbed with espresso and lavender.
“Make sure to set out a little dish to pieces of rind people don’t want to eat,” says Haver.
Finally, Allen says a host of a cheese tasting, “should have plenty of water available to cleanse their palates in between tastings.” Room temperature water does an excellent job wiping away cheese flavors.
Use All Your Senses
As I learned from sensory scientists while reporting my book How to Taste, the best way to sniff anything, cheese included, is in short explosive sniffs. These short puffs of air do a good job bringing scents in contact with your aroma receptors without causing you to go nose-blind to certain compounds. Take a few quick sniffs of the cheese while holding it right below your nose and observe which aromas you notice as most intense. At a casual cheese tasting you can do this mentally at an education-forward tasting take written notes of the flavors you notice.
Once you’ve examined the aromas of your cheese, it’s time to taste it. Hold the cheese in your mouth and chew it lightly, as you chew exhale out your nose. This encourages aroma compounds up the back of your throat to the aroma receptors in your nose. It’s a simple action that will help you perceive much more flavor from each bite.
Consider whether the flavors you taste match or contrast what you smelled. Note if there are any new flavors that arose upon tasting the cheese you didn’t discern when smelling it.
After you’ve examined the taste of the cheese it is time to focus on the mouthfeel. Pat Ford, Co-Founder of Beehive Cheese Company says to “use your tongue to push it up against the roof of your mouth. You’ll get all sorts of textures and all sorts of flavors.”
This technique highlights textural components like the cheese crystals in The Farm At Doe Run’s St. Malachi or 5 year and older Maker’s Reserve from Tillamook, or the fudgey smoothness of Bayley Hazen Blue from Jasper Hill Farm.
Once you’ve taken note of each cheese’s aroma, flavor, and mouthfeel, taste them all again with the sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami components you brought to the tasting. Does a sweet and fruity jam highlight flavors you didn’t notice before? How does a salty gouda transform the flavor of a bitter beer? Which cheese pairs best with a sour or tangy ingredient?
Capture Your Findings
A crucial step you can take to lock the flavor memory of each cheese in your mind forever is discussing the cheese while you’re tasting it. Look up information on each cheese like the location of the creamery or special cheesemaking techniques used to create it and share those facts as you taste the cheese. Jill suggests considering, “Who made this cheese? What is the origin of the milk, the animals, the landscape? Every cheese has a special story to tell about the make and aging process.”
Instead of describing the cheese in dull generic terms like “caramel” or “floral” try to paint a picture with your words, “it’s like having a Werther’s Original hard candy while walking through a grassy meadow of wildflowers.” Conjuring these images in your mind will help tie the sensory memory of the flavor of the cheese to a vivid picture.
If you or your tasting partners are having a hard time coming up with descriptors other than the cheese tastes really creamy, try to come up with points of comparison. Which cheese tastes the sweetest? Does the cheese taste more like nuts or grass? Which cheese has the most intense flavor? The most subtle? Talking through these questions will help you build a flavor profile for what you taste even if no specific flavor notes were immediately apparent to you.
Tasting cheese is about taking time to really savor something delicious, learn about your own palate, and to have conversations that you’ll remember forever.